Summer 2003: If I stay sober, will I turn into a boring person? I was always fun when I was drinking. The only bad bit was afterwards.
Now it feels really good to wake up every morning with a clear head and remember where I've been. But what if the penalty, the by-product, is to become a sensible, dreary, boring twat?
I'm supposed to drink only one cup of coffee a day, decaffeinated, and not have any sweets. I have a handful of Jelly Babies in my pocket, just for emergencies, such as now, sitting here in Sheryl's garden, my ex-wife's, thinking back over my life.
I have a chart of my life spread out in front of me with all the main incidents, all the horrible, serious ones. I'll also try to recall the fun. But the main point, for me, is to get to grips with what started it all, how I got to be like I am; to record everything, however bad, as truthfully as possible.
I'm an alcoholic. I'm proud to say that. It's what you have to do. I'm going to AA meetings. Three a week if I can make it. And I have a counsellor I'm going to keep on seeing. I haven't had a drink now for three months. I've been on the wagon before, for even longer periods, but I knew then it wouldn't last. I hope it will this time. Sheryl says I can stay here with her if I stay sober and sensible. I don't think I'll get another chance if I f*** this one up.
I've got an illness, I realise that now. It's not alcoholism, not really - that's more a result than a cause. What I've been suffering from all my life is a disease in my head. I'm scared of dying, that's part of it. If I have a sore eye I'm convinced I'm going blind.
If I've got a twitch I panic about it and it gets worse. I get obsessed about the simplest, silliest things, wanting things in exact rows, right numbers, proper places.
I've had no panic attacks recently, so that's good. I'm on various tablets to keep me calm or cheer me up, stop me getting depressed. I did take more than I should the other day - four instead of one - wanting a quick buzz, to feel better immediately, which, of course, was stupid. And I got in a bit of a state last night watching television. There was a programme showing some lads getting drunk round a bar, falling about, as I used to do, and I couldn't face it. It really upset me. So I went out into the garden. I told my doctor all this and he says it's a good sign.
I honestly don't know whether I'll keep this up. I haven't done in the past, so everyone thinks it won't last this time. Sheryl and I still have arguments over silly things, who said what, who didn't say what. But I'd never hit her again. I've hit nobody since that episode and I won't ever do it again.
All her friends were surprised when they found out I had hit her. They always thought she was a strong person. She thought that herself.
She now realises, she says, that she did fit into the classic pattern of women in this situation - keeping it secret, feeling guilty and ashamed, as if it was her fault, and of course telling herself it was a one-off. She did everything she could to please me, she says.
Now she's got the whip hand. She's mentally tougher than she was; she stands her own ground more. She's pushing me, in a way, just to test me, to see if I'll fail again. I think the children are testing me as well. They are sure it won't last, that I'll get into a rage and be off, as has happened before. I'm not as aggressive and full of anger as I used to be, so that's good. But Sheryl says if it doesn't work this time, that' s it. No way will she put up with any more of what I put her through in the past. I'll be out on my ear.
She wrote all that down just to remind herself of what things were like. Every time, over the years, I've rung up and pleaded with her to let me come back or help me. She's often read her notes to keep things fresh in her mind. She's not read them lately, which is something. It shows she thinks we might have a chance. I know she loves me. I hope.
Jimmy Five Bellies, my best friend, hasn't been to see me, and I haven't been up home to the northeast. Sheryl isn't keen on all that. She says it's where my problems always begin.
So I'm just taking things easy. Playing with the kids, going to the garden centre, having a quiet meal out. When we have friends or Shel's relations over they don't drink while they're here.
It's a lovely day and the kids are playing in the swimming pool. The garden's looking lovely. Shel is being nice to me, I'm being nice to her. We're going to have a barbecue this evening when Sheryl's dad comes round.
Doing my chart has cleared my head a bit, brought the main events and dramas of my life into focus, my brilliant career. Which it has been. Despite everything. Despite the worst moments.
October 1996: I took Shel and the kids to Gleneagles for a bit of a break. We had good fun. I took the kids swimming and we played with these amazing hawks. Later, over dinner in the hotel, we started arguing. It was partly about my family, and it was mainly my fault. I was mixing my drinks, champagne on top of whisky, which was stupid. The whole dining room could hear us.
Shel left the table and went back to our room. I followed her and attacked her. I headbutted her and threw her to the floor.
Her finger was broken, so she was screaming in agony. I tried to click the finger back into place, and that made her really shriek.
Bianca and Mason, her two children, were in the next room with the nanny, listening to it all. I found out later that Bianca, aged 10, was so upset she wanted to take a kettle of boiling water and come and pour it all over me. Fortunately the nanny calmed her down.
The next day Shel took the kids and left, telling me she wasn't coming back. I did nothing to stop her. I just accepted it.
I had pushed her around a bit before but nothing as bad as this. What I had done was terrible and at the time I didn't even say sorry. I knew I'd done wrong but I couldn't bring myself to apologise.
The day after that I flew off with Glasgow Rangers to play Ajax in the Champions League. I was in a dreadful state, racked with guilt, but just not able to say sorry. After 10 minutes I was sent off.
At half-time in the dressing room Richard Gough, our captain, lashed out at me for getting myself sent off so early in the game. I told him I'd beaten up my wife, and by now I knew that the press had found out and were waiting for me and that they'd really tear me apart. Which they did.
Perhaps I had done a bit more in the past than just pushing Sheryl. I had twisted her arm once and I banged her head on the floor in Italy. I don't know what happens, except that when I get in a state I take it out on the one I love most. But I paid dearly because it all came out and Shel and I separated, and I lost my wife.
After the beating-up I felt numb inside. I began to take Zimovane tablets, which I stole from Rangers after I found out where they were kept. I had had morphine several times over the years, before my operations, when I was in terrible pain, so I knew how it made you feel good and deadened the agony.
Everywhere I went, on the pitch or off it, rival fans would shout "wife-beater" at me. People were saying I shouldn't be picked for Rangers or England any more.
During my marriage to Shel, after some of our bigger rows and my worst behaviour, she had persuaded me to go to marriage guidance counselling. I only stood it for a short while and gave up quickly, but Shel stuck at it longer.
I should have had counselling. Years ago, when I was a boy in Gateshead, I had my first chance to get help, but I didn't go back.
When I was seven, I had a weird experience. I'd been playing football in the park all afternoon and all evening. I had my new football and I kept on playing, even though it had got dark and all the other kids had gone home.
As I was walking home on my own, I looked up at the stars and thought, how long do stars go on for? Then I wondered, how long will I live? Will it be okay when I'm dead or will I feel different? Suddenly I was scared, and I ran all the way home, screaming and crying.
I got into bed with me mam and dad, squeezed in beside them. I didn't tell them why I'd been screaming. I just sort of hid it in my head. It didn't come out again till recently, in a conversation with a counsellor at a clinic. It was a massive relief to talk about that. Looking back, it was the first time in my life I was aware of death. I'd never actually seen anyone die.
I've always been afraid of dying, for many reasons, since then, but until that counselling session I'd never realised when it all began.
In those days, whenever I had any money, I'd spend it on sweets. My fried Keith Spraggon and I used to go into one particular shop where we'd take the mickey out of the woman who ran it. We'd try to nick the sweets and she'd chase us out. One day when I was 10, I took Keith's little brother Steven, telling his mam I'd look after him.
I was mucking around in the shop when Steven ran out into the road in front of a parked ice-cream van. He didn't see there was an oncoming car and it went right into him.
I stood over his body screaming, "Please move, please move!" His lips did seem to be moving slightly but soon he was completely still. I was on my own with him for what seemed like ages while someone went for his mother. I just had to sit there, watching him die. I can still see his mother running down the road in her bare feet, screaming and screaming.
I felt Steven's death was my fault. I had said I would look after him and I didn't. Just speaking of it can make me cry.
Something else awful happened about that time. When I was a boy I used to see my mother and father have violent rows. I think it was just frustration. It was hard for him being out of work. If they had an argument I would rush across and hug both of them. I'd cry if they started rowing, or if my dad left us. They fell out several times and he moved out, sometimes to a room over a pub, on his own.
Around the time of Steven's death my dad had moved to Germany to look for work on the building sites, like the blokes in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet. He was away about a year. I don't think he always sent money home. My mother had three jobs at one time: she went out cleaning in the mornings, did two hours in a factory in the afternoon before coming home to give us our tea, then more cleaning in the evening. She also worked for a while in a chip shop.
We didn't starve but we didn't have much. All four of us kids - me, my brother and my two sisters - would get into the bath together, then we'd put our clothes in the bath and wash them. We only had one decent set of clothes each, so me mam would have to take them to the all-night launderette to dry them, then stay up half the night ironing them for us to wear in the morning.
After my dad returned home he started having seizures, some form of epilepsy. This happened once when I was alone at home with him. I thought he was dying. I tried to pull his tongue out of his throat because he was swallowing it. I was afraid he'd choke and die in front of me and it would be my fault for not rescuing him. He recovered that time, but not long afterwards he had a brain haemorrhage. From when I was 12, he was never able to work again.
It was around this time that I started displaying peculiar twitches and making noises. Just silly sounds, sort of swallowing all the time, gulping, or just shouting. I got thrown out of school for a week for making so much noise that no one else could concentrate. Along with the twitches I developed various obsessions. I became obsessed by the number five, and had to touch certain objects five times, put the light on and off five times, or open and close a door five times. I had to have everything lined up at a certain angle, whether it was plates on a table or my clothes. I insisted on keeping the light on at night and still do.
The doctor sent me to see a psychiatrist who made me play with a load of sand and bricks, which I thought was really stupid. I refused to go again. So all the twitches and stuff just carried on.
Summer 2004: I'm sitting in my hotel in Shropshire, Patshull Park, which has 280 acres, a golf course and a huge fishing lake. I've been playing for Wolverhampton Wanderers reserves. This place has been handy for their training ground, where I've been going each morning. I haven't been getting paid, just training with them.
I'm fit enough, lean enough, but my whole body aches all the time. In the old days I could train for hour after hour, no bother. I was often half-drunk. Perhaps the alcohol disguised the aches and agonies so that I couldn't feel them. Now, when I'm not drinking, I can feel every little twinge.
Wolves are bottom of the Reserve League, which was where they were when I arrived. At the back of my mind I suppose I was half-hoping that I might get a contract out of them. Not a big one, obviously. But now, sitting here in my hotel, I've had to admit to myself that it's not going to work. Wolves are not going to give me a contract, however titchy. It's heartbreaking, but I might as well acknowledge that that's it. I feel devastated. I hope I won't go into a deep depression. For the last two months training has been all I've really been concentrating on. I trained all morning, came back to the hotel and rested. Then I played a bit of solitaire on my mobile phone, or a chess game, playing against myself. I usually have the telly on as well.
I don't eat in the dining room. I just stay in my room, order food from room service. I don't get bothered. Other guests have been asking for autographs so I've arranged a system with the girls on reception. People leave their autograph books there, and I sign when I next pass through.
I don't feel lonely. It's just nice and quiet. You don't have arguments when you're on your own. I like hotels the way I like hospitals. After all, I've spent years of my life in hotels and in hospitals. (I've had 27 operations for football injuries.) It's the sense of being looked after, and the comfort.
I especially like it in hospitals when they give you morphine. I could do with more of that, just to zonk me out, stop me thinking. I suppose it is part of my longing to escape, my fondness for hotels and hospitals; of wanting to cut myself off from the real world, from the public, the media. In a hospital or a hotel you are not aware of family worries or domestic aggravation.
As I write now I still haven't had a drink for well over a year, a world record for me, at least since I was 18. I've been depressingly, boringly sober.
When I began my book I was spending some time at Shel's after I'd returned from a drying-out clinic in Arizona. I thought I would be staying there, perhaps for ever, if I behaved myself. But it does look as if it's the end. I put her through so much that she can't live with me any more. I'll have to admit defeat. I'm forced to acknowledge that the relationship, like my football career, is over. I miss Regan, our son, all the time.
Money has been the main cause of the arguments. I haven't had any income from football for about a year now, and not much from anywhere else. When I started maintenance payments I was making about £2m a year so I could afford it. Not now.
Fortunately I did manage to do one very sensible thing during my career. When I moved to Lazio, the Italian club, I put all of my £2m signing-on fee into a bank in the Channel Islands. I've used bits of it, but it's still mostly intact, except it was put into US dollars. That was the advice I was given. Dollars have gone down in value, but I'm hoping it will be enough to keep me going. I probably won't be able to live on it or on the interest, not these days, but at least I've something set aside. My plan is to put it into something which will give me an income and also perhaps a job, if I need it.
I have a bit of jewellery, too, which Jimmy has put away safely in the bank for me. I did buy myself a few nice things when I had the money. I've got a limited-edition Ayrton Senna watch, and a couple of other limited-edition racing-driver watches. And I have my medal from the Pope and my football memorabilia, my England shirts and caps and football stuff.
There are people who think I threw it all away, just as they think George Best did. They believe I could have done so much more with my talents if I hadn't been so self-indulgent and daft and drunk and stupid. I think the opposite. I think I have achieved far, far more than I ever expected to achieve, considering I'm me, stuck in this body and this head with all this going on. I would have done much less in life if it hadn't been for football.
It's very hard for other people to understand my mentality. It's only those who have experienced the same kind of obsessions and compulsions who can really understand it. You look in the mirror when you're slumped in the middle of a depression or a panic attack and you don't see yourself. You see another person, someone you don't like. You hate him so much you want to try to get away from him.
People are always trying to analyse me, explain why I'm like I am. They go on TV or write in the papers about what's wrong with me without knowing me. They often say I'm suffering from ADD - attention deficit disorder. That's bollocks. I might be hyperactive, always wanting to be doing something, unable to sleep properly, but I can concentrate when I want to. I always concentrated on training. Doing my book, I was able to concentrate and talk for three hours at a stretch - though it did my head in at times.
OCD, those are the other letters they throw at me - obsessive compulsive disorder. That's probably true. All the clinics have told me that, so I have to agree. I've always been obsessive, about little things as well as big things. I still have to have everything in a certain order.
Why I'm like this, f*** knows. Perhaps it's the traumas I've been through. The more I have been in therapy or talked about myself, as in my book, the more I understand myself, but I still can't explain why I'm the way I am.
Would I have been different without the traumas, the things going wrong in my life? I don't know. Or if my parents and childhood had been different? All I know is that I still get obsessed and have panic attacks and my head feels like it's about to explode.
I've often wished I was dead, but I just haven't got the balls to commit suicide. Then I think, if I did kill myself, what's that going to do to all those people who love me, who are constantly trying to help me? They would be devastated. Then I think I'd quite fancy it. I'd like it all to be over.
But I don't regret all the silly things I did. I don't really regret drinking, because I know I would do it again. I look upon myself as two people: Gazza and Paul Gascoigne. Paul Gascoigne is the sensible, kind, generous, caring one, if a bit boring. Gazza has been daft as a brush but could be very entertaining.
I think the Gazza stage in my life could be over. At least until I do something daft once again. What has helped me to feel that I have changed from the sort of person I have been in the past is getting it down on paper for the first time.
My plan at this moment is to go and stay at Jimmy's for a few months in the northeast. He is the only person outside my family I feel I can really trust. We do argue, all the time, like an old married couple, but I am relaxed and comfortable with him. He knows all my thoughts, all my secrets.
Jimmy only has a small flat, but he has a spare bed I can use. It will be like going back to the past, to where it all began.
© 2004 Paul Gascoigne
Extracted from Gazza My Story by Paul Gascoigne with Hunter Davies published by Headline at Ï18.99. Copies can be ordered for Ï15.19 plus Ï2.25 p&p from The Sunday Times Books First on 0870 165 8585 or at www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy
THE GAZZA FILE
Do you own a house?
None. Gave away last one to Sheryl.
Do you own a car?
None. Gave away last one, a £70,000 Mercedes soft-top, to Dad in 2002 when drunk.
What party did you vote for at the last election?
Didn't vote, have never voted. I have given my family a lot of money and houses, and yet they still voted Labour at the last election. That surprised me. I thought they would have become Tory, getting all that for nothing. I suppose my heart is still Labour.
Do you follow current events?
No, just the tennis.
Have you ever done any housework?
When I was young, living at home, I did a lot of jobs in the house. We had to. When I was married, I did now and again load the dishwasher.
When your son Regan was a baby, did you change his nappy?
About once, for a photograph. In hospital I pretended to Sheryl I'd changed him, but it was the nurse.
Do you believe in God?
Yes.
When did you last have an alcoholic drink?
April 2003. I was in China, depressed, and drank a bottle of whisky in my hotel room. It was after that I went to the clinic in Arizona.
Favourite television programmes?
Any sports, especially tennis. I find it hard to watch football. I'd rather be playing.
Did you have any superstitions as a player?
Too many to list, but if I won, I kept the same shinpads for the next game. If we lost, I threw them away and got new ones.
Of today's younger players, who do you admire?
Beckham, not just his football but how he has handled the media and his commercial work. I buggered up all that. I always seemed to be at war with them.
Favourite musician?
Elvis. I've got his autograph, which I swapped for an England shirt.
Last film seen
Gladiator. It was brilliant.
Last book read, or books currently by your bedside?
Anxiety and Panic Attacks - their cause and cure by Robert Handley and Pauline Neff; Understanding Obsessions and Compulsions by Dr Frank Tallis; Coping with Anxiety and Depression by Shirley Trickett; How to Stop Worrying by Frank Tallis; How to Heal Depression by Harold Bloomfield; Daily Reflections by Members of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Last time you cried?
Two weeks ago.